It was almost closing time. The petite, silver-haired woman was busy at the computerized cash register when the bell tinkled to alert her someone had entered the upscale fashion store.

She looked up, and there stood two youths wearing stocking masks. One had a gun, aimed right at her.

Both were wearing Charlotte Amalie High School uniform pants.

The boys took the 50-year-old woman into the back room and tied her hands behind her with a belt. The younger boy held a gun on her while the other searched the shop for money.

"The younger kid kept saying, 'Let's kill her, let's kill her,'" she recalls. "The older one told him no."

They got $800 out of the cash register and $80 from her purse. Then, pleased with their success, the boys went one step further.

They each raped her.

Afraid of antagonizing them, she avoided looking at their faces. Instead, she paid close attention to other details: their shoes, their voices and everything they said.

She heard one call the other by a nickname. She also noticed how the younger boy, about 15, deferred to the other, who seemed two or three years older.

"There was something about the way they interacted that made me believe they were brothers," the woman says.

She made sure the police knew her suspicion that the boys went to CAHS. She spoke with CAHS Principal Liston Davis. He told her, she says, that he believed he knew them.

But the boys -- who fit the description of assailants in at least two other cases -- remain at large.

Weeks after the rape, the victim called the case officer to find out whether she had met with Davis or interviewed the suspects. The officer, she says, responded curtly: "We don't work that way."

"I asked her where else are you going to find high school kids but in high school? It was all so frustrating."

The officer missed appointments with Davis and did not even question the two likely suspects for months.

When the victim urged her to do more on the case, the officer said she was overworked.

That officer was Cpl. Jacklyn Chesterfield. She was arrested Friday on charges of fraud and forgery --specifically, prosecutors say, she was moonlighting by working as a security guard at a store when she was supposed to be doing her police work.

Other factors, unique to juvenile law enforcement, have helped derailed the investigation.

A witness told police he saw the boys hanging around outside the woman's store before the rape and saw them leave afterward.

And when he saw them, they weren't wearing masks.

But the police have allowed him only to leaf through a mug book. He didn't see a lineup.

Why? The police don't do physical lineups in juvenile cases.

V.I. laws hamstring police by preventing them from making public descriptions, pictures or even composite drawings of juvenile suspects.

So the two boys haven't even been charged.

"The most important thing to me is that they never get another opportunity to get near another woman," their victim says.

"They are two young people who are very, very young and very misguided. And the system is letting them get away with it."